Underworld: Awakening's vampire warfare – film on TV recap

Kate Beckinsale stars as a sexy vampire warrior in this instalment in the Underworld series, on Channel 4 at 10pm this Sunday. Stuart Heritage discovers that watching it is like being trapped in Riga's loudest malfunctioning strobe-light factory

Underworld: Awakening's vampire warfare – film on TV recap

Kate Beckinsale stars as a sexy vampire warrior in this instalment in the Underworld series, on Channel 4 at 10pm this Sunday. Stuart Heritage discovers that watching it is like being trapped in Riga's loudest malfunctioning strobe-light factory

Sunday 4 May 2014 14.27 EDT
First published on Sunday 4 May 2014 14.27 EDT

"The Vampire and Lycans clan have been at war for centuries before I was born …" – Selene

These are the first words spoken in Underworld: Awakening. They're part of a tortured introductory voiceover that seems to last for several months, even though it only contains 108 words. The introduction serves a thankless task: getting you up to speed on exactly what happened in the previous three Underworld films, as if a) people would make their first step into a clapped-out franchise by starting with the fourth instalment and b) anyone actually had a personal investment in anything that happened in any Underworld film.

But, fine, perhaps you really are new to Underworld. Perhaps you're watching this on TV because you've been paralysed by episode three of Fargo, or because you can't turn over to Syfy and watch Strippers v Werewolves instead. If that's the case, here's the Underworld series in a nutshell: Kate Beckinsale is a sexy vampire who falls in love with a werewolf, even though she's supposed to kill werewolves. Then the werewolf becomes a vampire/werewolf who has sex with Kate Beckinsale. (There was a third film, but Beckinsale wasn't in it, so nobody cared what happened.) There, that's the entire series summed up in 51 words. To save everyone time, I should write the introduction to the next Underworld film.

"The world I once knew has changed. Vampires and Lycans are now the hunted" – Selene

The weirdest thing about all this scene-setting is that it's almost redundant. Whatever mythology the series had painstakingly put together is almost immediately jettisoned. At the very beginning film, we learn that Beckinsale has been cryogenically frozen for a decade, all the werewolves and vampires are dead and the humans are now, ostensibly, the baddies. That's the only launch pad for the next 90 minutes or so, when we watch Beckinsale murder scores of strangers with a brave new level of sub-Arnie wit as she searches for her boyfriend from the first two films – except nobody thought to tell her that the actor who plays her boyfriend didn't want to reprise his role this time. All that death for nothing. Life is precious, and she'd do well to remember that. Perhaps someone should buy her a DVD of Eat Pray Love for her next birthday.

Luckily, some of Underworld's trademarked moves have managed to sneak in. The hammy British actors, from Bill Nighy to Derek Jacobi, in the first films are all present here in the form of Charles Dance and Stephen Rea. Their performances, which appear to be the result of a secret scenery-chewing competition, are the closest this film gets to a treat. Although that might only be because the rest of the film is roughly the equivalent of being trapped in Riga's loudest malfunctioning strobe-light factory while someone aggressively makes you stupider by attacking you in the head with a saucepan.

"Defend the second rotunda!" – David

Tonally, Underworld: Awakening seems like one of the original Planet of the Apes sequels. The story was told and conclusively dealt with in the first two films, but the series still makes money, so it's just spinning its wheels until everyone gets bored and wanders off. The last Underworld film, Rise of the Lycans, was a superfluous Battle for the Planet of the Apes filler episode. This film is a humans-v-other story, like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. But at least those films were fairly obvious allegories for the US civil rights movement, whereas the Underworld series appears to be is a test to see how much rubbish teenage boys will sit through if there's a pretty girl in it. On the other hand, we haven't seen Underworld's Beneath the Planet of the Apes yet. Perhaps this means the next film will be full of bomb-worshipping mutants who blow up the world and kill everyone in it. Fingers crossed.

But, really, the question is this: can a film in which a girl tears open a werewolf's head with her bare hands really be all that bad? The answer, staggeringly, is yes. Strippers v Werewolves is still on, you know. The remote control can't be far away.

Notes

• I'm no mathematician, but I'd conservatively estimate that 80% of this film is just stuff jumping in slow motion.

• Underworld was more than two hours long. Underworld: Evolution was 15 minutes shorter. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was 15 minutes shorter than that. Underworld: Awakening doesn't even hit the 90-minute mark. The good news is that if there's ever a fifth Underworld film,they might be able to fit it on Vine.

• And a fifth film is all but an inevitability, given that Underworld: Evolution was the most successful film of the entire series, for reasons that make me want to take to bed and divorce myself from humanity.

• Perhaps Beckinsale's most admirable trait is her ability to pull on a full-length PVC catsuit in about 20 seconds immediately after escaping from a cryogenic freezer. If I'd had been the star, I would have needed a 45-second cutaway shot of me rolling on the floor in a pile of talcum powder, trying to stuff my thighs into the leg holes with both hands. You're welcome for that mental image.